Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Two fun board books for the youngest members of the family. Murray Ball needs no introduction and of course The Cat's Pyjamas standard edition won the NZ Post Children’s Choice
Award last year. rrp $13.50

Another in the My New Zealand Stories series of vividly imagined accounts of life in the past, this one in April 1968. rrp $18.50

Now out in paperback and issued in time for Anzac Day, David Hill's moving story so brilliantly illustrated by Fifi Colson. Published in both English and Maori,

The number of fiction books due
for release in the first half of this year is both exciting and impressive. Tanya Moir's aptly
titled second novel Anticipation
is due out in March. It is a dark and humorous novel about family history and
the power and risk of knowledge. Keep an eye out for our February e-newsletter
to enjoy a Q&A with her about the book. After reading Aorewa McLeod's memoir
piece in the most recent Sport,
I can see why I'm not alone in looking forward to picking up a copy of Who Was That
Woman Anyway? Snapshots of a Lesbian Life.. Dim Post blogger Danyl

McLauchlan participated
in our most recent True
Stories Told Live storytelling cabaret here in Wellington. He told
a hilarious tale about an attempted seduction involving wasabi laced sushi. If
this true story is anything to go by his new novel Unspeakable
Secrets of the Aro Valley is bound to be a rollicking good read.
Donna Malane'sMy Brother's
Keeper is in bookshops now, and it's the NZSA Pindar Publishing
Prize winner's second thrilling novel featuring missing persons expert Diane
Rowe. You can watch a short clip of Malane talking about her inspiration for
the book's setting and characters here.

The Age - January 26, 2013

A novel approach to finding an audience for his script led to a very unexpected, and very happy, outcome, writes Jason Steger.

Shrewd moves ... Simsion's book, The Rosie Project , was produced as a means to getting his script noticed and interest has snowballed. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

About this time last year, Graeme Simsion had a script he'd been plugging away at as part of a screenwriting course at Melbourne's RMIT University. It was going well - he had won an Australian Writers' Guild award for the best romantic comedy script and sent it to a New York agent, with no joy, but a local producer, Roslyn Walker, had taken out an option. Things were looking pretty good.Today things are looking even better. We are sitting in his Fitzroy home talking not about that script but rather his novel, which will be published in Australia next week and over the coming months around the world - at this stage publishing rights have been sold to 32 countries for about $1.8 million.Simsion wrote the novel for one reason: ''It was a question of how do you get a script noticed and one of the ideas that gets kicked around in screenwriting circles is get it published as a novel first.''The Rosie Project tells the story of Professor Don Tillman, geneticist, probable Asperger's sufferer, socially awkward and a disaster with women. First dates are invariably catastrophic - if he can get that far. But Don wants a partner and with the help of his best friend Gene, whose own project is to have sex with a woman from every country in the world, devises a questionnaire: ''A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time-wasters, the disorganised, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or, realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates.''

Don is utterly idiosyncratic in his habits. He eats the same meal on particular days, plans his activities by the minute and hates to deviate from his timetable. He wears clothes built for comfort and ease of washing rather than any feeling for style.He christens his questionnaire the ''Wife Project'', but things go awry when he meets Rosie, a completely unsuitable student from the project point of view but whom he agrees to help identify her biological father after the death of her mother. All that is known is that on her graduation night and before she married, Rosie's mother had a one-night stand with someone in the same class. The two decide to test the DNA of all those in a photo taken that night to solve the mystery.Simsion admits the events of the past year seem extraordinary, like ''living the dream''.

Barry
Humphries, AO, CBE, the Australian comedian, satirist, artist, and author has
been appointed a Patron of Honour by the International League of Antiquarian
Booksellers (ILAB). The appointment recognises his major contribution to
the antiquarian book trade.

Mr Humphries graciously accepted the honorary position following a joint
invitation from the Presidents of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association
(ABA) in the United Kingdom and the Australian and New Zealand Association of
Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB): Laurence Worms and Sally Burdon. He joins
a select body which includes Sir David Attenborough and Umberto Eco.

Mr Humphries is perhaps best known for his stage and television alter ego Dame
Edna Everage. He is also a film producer and scriptwriter, a star of
London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer, an accomplished
landscape painter and a prominent book collector. Mr Humphries has spent
much of his life immersed in music, literature and the arts. A
self-proclaimed 'bibliomaniac', his house in London supposedly contains some
25,000 books, many of them first editions of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.

The ILAB is a global network for the rare book trade and represents 1860 of the
world’s finest antiquarian booksellers in 32 countries.

Elizabeth David is the food writer to whom Britain owes a great deal as she is the woman who almost single-handedly changed the face of British food and cooking in a dreary post-war country. She introduced food such as paella, hummus, ratatouille, moussaka and of course olive oil, pasta, artichokes and fresh herbs. Around the world her recipes and her wonderful writing continues to inspire even today, 60 plus years since she published her first cookery book, A Book of Mediterranean Food.

I talked to Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand this morning aboutAt Elizabeth David’s Tablewhich is is a collection of her best everyday recipes compiled by renowned writer/editor/publisher Jill Norman, who was David’s long-time editor at Penguin when I met her and who since 1992 has been the literary executor of her estate.

Jill Norman has carefully created a book which has 12 chapters of recipes – from starters through to sweet things – interlaced with short essays from Elizabeth David, many of which originally appeared in her books and also magazines. This appealing blend gives interest beyond the average cookbook. And of course for the first time David's recipes are accompanied by photographs. Praise must also go to the photographer David Loftus The photography is in muted colours and features the earthenware pots and plain white china that Elizabeth David favoured. I am sure she would have approved.

As the owner of many many cookbooks I have to say this one has already become a great favourite and is a joy both to cook from and just to kick back and read. .She is surely the greatest food writer of our times.Not sure how long Radio NZ leave their interviews on-line but it is there presently if you have 10 minutes to spare and would like to hear a longer piece about this special book.

At each stop-off, local writers – including
Pat White, Tim Upperton, Marty Smith, Tina Makereti, Helen Heath, and Lynn
Jenner – will join the tour to read from their work. The writers expect some
lively discussion to come out of these gatherings.

‘We want these events to inspire people, and
get them talking not just about our work, but about the fantastic new writing
that’s being made in New Zealand at present,’ says Kirsten McDougall, author of
The Invisible Rider (VUP, 2012).

The three writers conceived of the tour as a
way to take their work to an audience beyond Wellington.

‘As first time writers, our work is largely
unknown,’ says Pip Adam, author of Everything
We Hoped For (VUP, 2010). ‘We weren’t content to sit around and wait. We
wanted to get out of Wellington and meet new readers ourselves.’

Ashleigh Young, author of Magnificent Moon (VUP, 2012), says: ‘I
think writers can have a hard time getting out of their comfort zones. But as
with any job you love, it’s good to break the routine and emerge from the cave
now and then.’

The three writers have made impressive starts
to their careers. Adam was recently awarded a 2012 NZ Arts Foundation New
Generation Award. McDougall and Young have received rave reviews for their
first books and were both included the NZ
Listener Best Books of 2012 review.

The Rocky Outcrop Writers Tour is funded by
Creative New Zealand. Admission is free. All welcome.

Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, is completely wrong, writes Stephen Corry. Diamond argues that industrialized people (‘modern’) can learn from tribal peoples (‘traditional’) because they show how everyone lived until a few thousand years ago. Corry agrees that ‘we’ can learn from tribes, but counters they represent no more of a throwback to our past than anyone else does. He shows that Diamond’s other—and dangerous—message is that most tribes engage in constant warfare. According to Diamond, they need, and welcome, state intervention to stop their violent behavior. Corry argues that this is merely a political opinion, backed by questionable and spurious data. He sees Diamond’s position as one of supporting colonial ideas about ‘pacifying savages’ and says it is factually and morally wrong.

(Page 1 of 4)

I ought to like this book: after all, I have spent decades saying we can learn from tribal peoples, and that is, or so we are told, Jared Diamond’s principal message in his new “popular science” work, The World Until Yesterday. But is it really?

‘The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?’ by Jared Diamond. 512 p. Viking Adult. $20.89 (General Photographic Agency/Getty)

Diamond has been commuting for 50 years between the U.S. and New Guinea to study birds, and he must know the island and some of its peoples well. He has spent time in both halves, Papua New Guinea and Indonesian‐occupied West Papua. He is in no doubt that New Guineans are just as intelligent as anyone, and he has clearly thought a lot about the differences between them and societies like his, which he terms Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (“WEIRD”). He calls the latter “modern.”Full article

Published by Doubleday - $29.99Note publication is this Friday, 1 February.

I was so impressed with this first novel by 24 year old Roger Hobbs. His writing style is something of a cross between that of Lee Child and Elmore Leonard - fast, intriguing and suspenseful with great dialogue.

I am not surprised to learn that film rights have been acquired by Warner Brothers in a
very substantial deal. The producer, Kevin McCormick, is the former chief
executive for Warner Bros and has already hired an A-list screenwriter.

Here is a recent interview with the author which the publishers have kindly supplied. It serves to give you an idea of the story. I found the book hard to put down and read it in three long sessions. It runs to 324 pages. The story takes place over 48 hours.

Q: What exactly is a GHOSTMAN?

A: When a crew of criminals plans a heist, each person
has a different role to play. There are probably a couple of roles you know
already. The wheelman is the guy who drives the getaway car. The boxman knows
how to open locks and safes. The bagman carries the cash and takes
transportation risks. There are a couple you probably don’t know, either. The
guy who plans the heist is called the jugmarker. The thug who carries the guns
is called the buttonman.

A ghostman can be useful in a myriad of criminal
enterprises—identity theft, corporate espionage, armed robberies, bank fraud,
drug distribution—and is responsible for anything that requires a disappearing
act. In short, he’s an expert in the subtle and challenging art of getting away
with it. His job is to make sure nobody gets caught.

Q: When and how did you first get the idea for this
novel?

A: I first got this idea the summer between my
sophomore and junior years of college. I was walking home late one night after
a movie when I stumbled across an armoured car depot. Now, this doesn’t look
like you think it should—it doesn’t have thick brick walls, rows of security
cameras or a bunch of security guards sitting around playing poker. No, it
looks like an office building with a bunch of armoured cars parked out front.

Being naturally curious, I thought I’d have a look. I
walked around for a bit and after a while, finally worked up the nerve to touch
one. As soon as I did, I felt like I was struck by lightning. Instantly my
brain was full of different ideas about how I could rob it. I must have spent
an hour out there in the dark, examining every part of that car. I noted all
the features and considered all the weaknesses. That night I went home and
wrote the first chapter of GHOSTMAN.

Q: Tell us a little about Jack Delton and how you developed
his character?

A: Jack is a man with an extraordinary,
one-in-a-million talent: he is completely unmemorable. You could walk by him on
the street every day for a year and never remember his face. He doesn’t have a
name anyone knows, he doesn’t have a look, he doesn’t have a bank account. No
credit card, no social-security number, no web profile. He’s nobody, and he’s
anybody. If he needs to drive, he can be a driver. If he needs to fight, he can
be a fighter. He can become anyone he needs to be in the blink of an eye.

This talent—his unremarkablity—is the very first thing
I ever knew about his character. I developed him as a person around this idea.
What sort of things does a man with no identity do? What does he like? How does
he go about his day? Jack is a tough guy and a hardened criminal, but I wanted
my readers to sympathize with his unusual, and somewhat melancholy, existence.

Q: You wrote this novel while in college and in fact
sent it to your (now) agent on the day you graduated. When did you start
writing and were you always drawn to crime stories?

A: I’ve been writing since I was twelve. Since then
I’ve written seven full-length novels, two plays, a few screenplays and a pack
of spec scripts for television. I have been writing four hours a day, every
day, for ten years. I feel like I have to write or I’ll go crazy. It’s in my
blood. I didn’t start thinking about crime fiction, however, until I read
Robert Crais’s The Monkey's Raincoat when I was sixteen years old. The voice in
that book was so wonderful that I immediately started writing my own private
investigator novel. After that I moved on to other authors that I thought had
strong, dark writing styles. I ate up everything from Dashiell Hamett to James
Ellroy to Lee Child. I was most attracted to novels where the main characters
were criminals themselves, like Donald Westlake’s Parker novels. I loved the
idea of getting away with it, so I thought I’d try to write a book that could
share that incredible sense of fear and excitement I’d come to love

Q: Okay, you obviously know an awful lot about staging
a heist—starting with how the Fed prints money and transports and safe-guards
it in armoured trucks, to guns and explosives and how the person driving the
getaway car plots the best escape route. How did you learn about these things?

A: First things first, I should say that most of the
things you need to know to become a world class criminal mastermind are on the
Internet. It isn’t stuff you can just put into Google, but it’s there if you
know where to look. There are hidden sites on the deep web with forums on every
criminal topic you can imagine. Blow up a car? You got it. Bloodstain pattern
analysis? A whole course. Disable a silent alarm? Absolutely. Most of the
research I did for GHOSTMAN happened while I was sitting right here in front of
this pale blue glowing computer screen.

But not all of it. The Internet could only get me so
far, so I went on a lot of field trips. In order to study the monetary process,
I toured the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, where I was
allowed to walk around and observe hundreds of millions in new bills get ready
for circulation. I went to dive bars all around the country where I interviewed
active criminals and traded secrets for cigarettes. I did a two-week training
course with the NRA out in the mountains to learn the inner workings of
firearms. I taught myself to pick locks and hotwire cars in the parking lot of
my dorm block. I exchanged emails with a professional forger in the UK who
specialized in passports and Eastern European driver’s licenses. I talked
online with a working hitman. Of course not everything in GHOSTMAN is accurate,
but I did my best to make it all feel real.

Q: What did you learn in your research that surprised
you the most?

A: The most surprising thing I learned in the course
of my research was just how rare intelligently committed crimes really are. A
world-class crook might pull off two large-scale jobs in his or her entire
life, because anybody with the brains to plan a complicated, successful heist
could make twice as much money in half the time by dealing drugs instead. Also,
bank robberies have an astoundingly high chance of getting solved by the police
second in fact, only to murder.

Q: Are you really 24 or are you a really good ghostman
yourself?

A: Part of me wants to be a ghostman. I think
everyone, at one point or another, has wanted to do what Jack does. Everyone
has fantasized about getting up and leaving and never coming back. A ghostman
is a living incarnation of that fantasy. His identity is fluid, so he can
change himself to fit any situation. Whenever things get too hairy, or a little
boring, he can sever all ties, pack a few things in an overnight bag and fly
off to another part of the world. He can start over again as many times as he
wants without any consequences. Of course there is a high price for this
lifestyle. A ghostman can’t celebrate Christmas at home with his family, or
make friends, or fall in love. The ghostman wakes up every morning and chooses
who he wants to be, but as a result he can never become anything more than what
he already is.

Q: So what’s next for you? Without giving away the
ending of the book can you tell us if we’ll see any of the characters from
GHOSTMAN again?

A: I’m already hard
at work on a sequel to GHOSTMAN. This adventure finds Jack at odds with his old
mentor, with the biggest payday of their lives on the line. I can’t say much
about it, but I will say that the events of GHOSTMAN have big repercussions on
Jack’s world. He'll have to use every ounce of his wits to avoid getting caught
this time, especially when he has to choose between safety and loyalty

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Roger Hobbs is 24 years old and completed the first draft of this novel while still
a senior at Reed College. He has worked as a radio host, a rifle range
instructor, a note-taker and a security guard. He is a recent graduate of Reed
College. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Inaugural recipient of the Te
Atairangikaahu Award for Poetry, author, artist and organic farmer Reihana
Robinson follows up her featured status in AUP
New Poets 3 (Auckland University Press, 2008) with a vibrant and inventive
first full collection, Auē Rona. Part cosmological revivification of the Maori
legend of Rona and the Moon, part feminist allegory, part edgy, cadent
testimony, Auē Rona mixes the
contemporary with the historical, the factual with the fabled as the
resurrected titular heroine charts her way through modern life. As such, the
core of the book is framed by verse with such evocative titles as ‘Rona does
the hula’, ‘Rona’s descendants: Raro Taro’, ‘Rona mourns’ and ‘Rona wants’, the
latter poem giving an insight into the texture, thematic focus and linguistic play
of the broader work:

I want to

be that glow.

I want to

climb into her headdress

in broad daylight.

I want

a world lit and glowing.

I want to feel claws

on my scarecrow arms.

I want to jostle against,

a different kind of silence.

I want hollow drums, soft

patches, clumps of vegetation.

I want to feaze daylight.

The liberated, street-beat,
street-smart subject matter is evident elsewhere in poems like ‘Indian sister’,
‘What the stars say’ and ‘Maori creation’. Reminiscent of Tusiata Avia’s
collection, Bloodclot (Victoria
University Press, 2009), Auē Rona examines
modern womanhood through the re-forging of tales from the past. Along the way,
cultural belonging and personal sensuality are microscoped. All this and a
cover (plus additional images) by New Zealand (of Maori and German descent)
artist Noa Noa von Bassewitz make for a superb first book.

Another reworking of tradition
(this time of form rather than topic) finds poet, editor, anthologist, archivist
and publisher, Mark Pirie updating the poetic mode, the triolet. Like the
villanelle and rondeau, the triolet belongs to old French poetic forms which
begun life as songs recited by peasant farmers to each other whilst sewing and
tilling the fields. With an emphasis upon the oral (and thus upon the rhythmic)
and the amusing, the triolet possesses a witty, vibrant succinctness well
utilised in recent years by prominent poets like Wendy Cope. Pirie adapts the
triolet to the New Zealand land, mores and language, as evident in the early
poem, ‘In Thorndon’:

Birds call and cats fight;

I sit and
listen

In Thorndon at night.

Birds call
and cats fight;

It’s nearly moonlight

Here where
trees glisten.

Birds call and cats fight

In Thorndon
at night.

Old Hat is a
collection of close to 40 triolets, with Pirie not only outlining his literary
engagement with the form in an astute ‘Introduction’ but modernising the
conventions of the triolet through verse devoted to both the famous (Margaret
Mahy, Usain Bolt, Dorothy Parker..) and his interests (cricket, rock music…..).
May Old
Hat revive an interest in the triolet amongst many more poets.

When not writing triolets,
Mark Pirie’s been busy researching the life and rejuvenating the work of one of
our ‘lost’ voices, Robert J, Pope. Pope was a popular New Zealand poet and
songwriter from the early 1900s until the end of the Second World War, and
apart from writing verse which actively engaged with the major cultural and
international events of the day (the rise of Fascism in Europe, the 1924-5
Invincibles tour of England and France, the first Labour Government), he also
penned a number of influential songs, particular those recited in schools like New Zealand, My Homeland. The importance
of Pope to this era, as witness and recorder, can’t be underestimated, and in
not only resurrecting this significance of the man but faithfully gathering his
oeuvre, Pirie in King Willow: Selected
Poems does a meritorious task, and edits an interesting and indispensable
book for aficionados of New Zealand poetry, past and present. Another fine and
thorough ‘Introduction’ by Pirie leads the reader through a heady throng of
poems and songs. The title page to the anthology details this selection as ‘No.
1 in the HeadworX Classic Poetry Series’. On the strength of King Willow, I can’t wait to see which forgotten
poet Pirie next restores to our literary consciousness.

Dunedin poet, Marion Jones’
second collection, Reflections is a
delicately woven and satisfying story about memory and dysfunction.Over the course of three sections, she charts
the journey of the early years, escapisms and returns of a bright narrator constrained
by the guilt of the death of her mother in childbirth, her father’s distance
and her stepmother’s brittleness. Through poems such as ‘Balloons’, ‘Dog at the
door’, ‘Never told’, ‘Flood’ and others, Jones crafts a series of credible
characters fractured by the strictures of the blended family and old-fashioned
values. Throughout language and imagery provide spark and the possibility of
catharsis, as in the latter poem, ‘A crack’:

Along her back wall,

a crack angles from

the ground in an arch.

Beneath, a geranium

twines a lattice attached

to the rough-cast. Lower

yet, a gash in the plaster

exposes a net of chicken

wire beneath. Until her

children no longer cling

and bloom and climb,

the fissure will remain

a feature of the house.

This collection maps
landscape as much as whanau, with poems sited by topography near and far,
including Mount Hood, Opoho Hill, Taiaroa Heads, Los Angeles, Kazakhstan and so
forth. Always what it means to have a
home is considered and re-evaluated – a place of extrication? a place of
safety? a place of soul? a place of itinerancy? A rewarding read.

From one examination of
family to another with poet and New Zealand Poetry Society National
Coordinator, Laurice Gilbert’s My Family
& Other Strangers. Gilbert’s book is shorter than Jones’ but packs no
less poetic punch. The whanau here isn’t the family tattered by dysfunction,
but the family bonded by quirkiness. Through poems such as ‘Strangers’, ‘Life
is a Grocery Store’, ‘Safe at Home’ and ‘Family Snapshot’, Gilbert builds a
picture of an unconventional family. Along the way, paternity, sibling
fraternity and rivalry, maturing and loss are explored. Often the inventiveness
the author uses in her thematic approaches is paralleled by a skillful deployment
of poetic form which includes a villanelle, prose-poem and pantoum. In ‘Another
Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In My Handbag’ Gilbert also displays an adept
engagement with the work of other poets (here, American poet Billy Collins’
‘Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House’):

I’m tempted to depict my mother-in-law as barking.

Whenever we meet she doggedly insists

on establishing her position as matriarch,

sharing family anecdotes she’s made up,

or misconstrued, or simply lost the gist.

Her son, heir to his late father’s sanity genes,

books a long overdue duty trip to Taupo.

After five chocolate-filled road trip hours

my buttons come alive:

sparking, sparring, scarring.

I wish I could turn her off as I arrive.

She asks my husband where I will sleep.

Scorning the spare double bed

as too wretchedly hot to share, has already

set up a stretcher for me in ‘his’ room…

Along the way, as in
collection’s second section, ‘Vincent – an autobiography’, the eccentricity of
the familial is distinguished by the intimacy of the isolate, the challenges of
being daughter, sister and mother is contrasted with the trials of being an
artist. At $12, this is a steal.

About the reviewer

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry
collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011), the book of
literary interviews Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in
Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010) and the poetry anthology Our Own Kind:
100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House, 2009). Recently, her
poetry has been published in Evergreen Review (Grove Press, US), Meanjin
(Aus), Penduline Press – The New
Zealand Issue (US), Snorkel (Aus) and Structo (UK). She’s Poetry Editor of Takahe
and coordinates New Zealand's National Poetry Day. She was runner up in 2012
Dorothy Porter Prize for Poetry (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Prize, 2011
Landfall Essay Prize and 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems,
and shortlisted for the 2012 Jane Frame Memorial Award for Literature. A Poet’s
Page containing a selection of her recorded work and texts can be found on The
Poetry Archive (U.K.), directed by Sir Andrew Motion.

Charity needs £1m to turn Perrott's Folly, said to have
inspired author, into centre for Birmingham community

Perrott's Folly in Edgbaston offers views
over where JRR Tolkien lived and went to school. Photograph: David Sillitoe for
the Guardian

It wasn't the most promising of pitches: when Ben Bradley suggested that a
homeless charity buy a derelict, windblown Georgian tower in a poor district of
Birmingham he expected, and got, some blank looks.The building is spectacular but perilous. It sways slightly in strong wind
and its seven rooms – one on each storey – are the size of a hearth rug. But,
said Bradley: "As it turned out, my CEO is a Tolkien fanatic, and so the deal
was done."

The Trident
Reach the People charity paid £1, and became proud owners of one of the
oldest and most eccentric structures in Birmingham, a building better known in
Japan than it is on the other side of the city.

The eyeball-shaped windows
at the top of Perrott's Folly look down in one direction on where JRR Tolkien lived as a
child, and in the opposite direction on the Oratory, where he went to school. It
also gives a spectacular view of the other tower he passed twice a day, the
gothic ornamented chimney of the Edgbaston waterworks, which in the writer's day
would have belched smoke from the steam engines. To Tolkien true believers,
there is no point looking further for the origins of the two sinister towers
that loom over the world of his Lord of the Rings.

The folly stood at the heart of a magnificent park when it was built by a
local eccentric, John Perrott, in 1758. The pragmatic explanation is that it was
a hunting lodge and status symbol, but legends insist he built it to look
yearningly at his wife's grave 15 miles away, or that when she was alive it
allowed him spy on her trysts with her gamekeeper lover. Conspiracy theorists
point to the Masonic symbols in the ornate plasterwork of the top room, and
there are tales of secret passages and underground chambers.Full piece at The Guardian

Keith Miller examines a trenchant critique of the
late Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens: In the
pantheon of journalists?

By Keith
Miller

The Telegraph 30 Jan 2013

The journalist, essayist and public speaker Christopher Hitchens, who died just over a
year ago of oesophageal cancer, was no slouch when it came to the gentle art of
making enemies. Liberal isolationists, religious fanatics, female comedians –
all felt the wrath of his bombast. On a more intimate level, he had a talent for
tiffs and squabbles, takedowns and feuds, that made Truman Capote look like a
Buddhist monk. So it would perhaps be surprising if his shade were allowed to
rest in peace for long.

Unhitched by Richard Seymour (Verso,
£9.99) is the first book to cast a cold eye on Hitchens’s career in the wake of
his death, and assess its possible legacy. It won’t be the last; nor, probably,
the best. But by being the first it – courageously, maybe – risks being seen as
the nastiest, trundling off the presses while its subject is still a few degrees
above room temperature. Seymour claims that Hitch was a hypocrite: that his
writing, his political allegiances and, most notably, his friendships were
marked by professions of loyalty, and acts of desertion.

It is from his memoir Hitch-22 that two main, and interrelated, themes
of Unhitched are drawn: the lifelong melodrama of friendship, and the
idea that political life consists of a series of actions and gestures rather
than a coherent programme of belief and commitment. A good example of this is
Hitchens’s belief that being waterboarded for a story added the tiniest
microgramme of weight to his opinion that it should be allowed in a country that
claimed to be not only civilised, but also competent to export its civilisation
overseas by force of arms.

That the second theme inflects on the first can be seen from the Rushdie
affair, when the targeting of a British author by religious fundamentalists
galvanised what had hitherto been a fairly lukewarm affection for Rushdie on
Hitchens’s part – and vulcanised his opposition to hardline religious belief. It
can also be seen in his repudiation of Edward Said (Hitchens’s hostile review of Said’s reissued
Orientalism followed the latter’s death by about the same time-lag as
Unhitched follows his); and in his denunciation of Sidney Blumenthal for
perjuring himself in the Lewinsky inquisition, which cost him most of the few
friends he still had on the American Left.

It’s the political triangulations that get Seymour’s blood boiling. A pattern
of discarding causes when they ceased to be expedient, a willingness to kiss up
to power while emitting torrents of bluster about his lonely duty to speak truth
to it, can be identified even in the salad days of Seventies Oxford. Hitchens is
quite funny about his youthful double life in Hitch-22, swapping his
donkey jacket for a dinner jacket on the hoof between the barricades at Cowley
and High Table like some arriviste superhero (he was quite funny about lots of
things, though he could be eye-gougingly unfunny when he tried to be funny). But
Seymour sees Hitchens’s tragic last act – the alliance with the neo-cons, the
borderline racism, the ghastly statements about cluster bombs – as inevitable. Full article at The Telegraph

Mantel does the double and claims the Costa Book Award for Bring Up the
Bodies.

So it's Hilary Mantel, again. Bring Up the Bodies has
won the overall Costa Book Award following Mantel's Man Booker victory in 2009
for Wolf Hall, and the same award for its sequel last year. It has beaten not
only all the other novels of 2012, but also the best poetry collection,
biography, first novel and children’s book. Mantel’s all-conquering Tudor saga,
which last year sold 313,000 copies in this country, is well on the way to
becoming a classic with a BBC and RSC adaptation already in the works.

Inevitably there will be grumbles from the sceptics. Was there really no
other novel published in 2012 to compete with Bring Up the Bodies? How did Zadie
Smith’s NW, her most accomplished work to date, miss
out on even a measly shortlisting? What about Nicola Barker’s eccentrically
hilarious The Yips? Then there are the whispered doubts
about Bring Up and the Bodies itself. Longtime Mantel readers say her darkly
experimental Beyond Black was a superior book. And does the Tudor setting
with its familiar historical characters – Henry VIII and all that – make its
popularity a form of easy nostalgia?

Maybe there’s some truth to that. The richness of its language and
psychological penetration cannot hide the fact that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the
Bodies can be read as posh Philippa Gregory. I cannot also help thinking that
given its now near-canonical reputation, the judges might have been a touch
intimidated – refusing Thomas Cromwell, as the novels' readers will know, is by
no means easy. One of the best other contenders, the graphic memoir Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan
Talbot, is beautifully done and highly original. But like the first novel
category winner Francesca Segal’s The Innocents – an astute and well-crafted
take on Jewish North London – I cannot honestly say it deserved to steal
Mantel’s crown.

With Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel has relaxed into the sequence, writing with
greater economy and wit. The false notes in Wolf Hall – too much love for
Cromwell, too little for his rival Thomas More – were muffled in the sequel by
Cromwell’s growing ruthlessness and More’s death. The sequence in which Henry
VIII falls from his horse while jousting and is suspected dead is especially
brilliant. Even though you know the real historical outcome Mantel, like
Shakespeare in his history plays, puts you in the shoes of participants who
cannot have known how things would turn out.

Most pleasing, though, is the sheer joy Mantel takes in writing the books –
something shared by her many readers. When was the last time a prize-winning
book doubled as a holiday treat?

The good news for her fans is that her resolution for this year was to keep
up the work on the final book in the trilogy, which will tell of Cromwell’s
downfall via the Flanders Mare Anne of Cleves. Mantel has broad fictional
shoulders but I do hope that all the praise and pressure will not prevent her
from delivering the satisfying climax that she – and her readers – so dearly
crave.

Winning the Costa prize says much about our hard times,
but more about British literary culture in the age of the Kindle

Hilary Mantel's success
with Bring Up the Bodies , the second volume of a projected trilogy devoted to
the life and times of Henry VIII's chancellor Thomas Cromwell, marks an
unprecedented grand slam: Booker followed by Costa, with the Women's Prize for
Fiction beckoning. It's an outcome that says a lot about the Costa prize, even
more about the hard times in which Bring Up the Bodies has been published, but
perhaps most of all about British literary culture in the age of the Kindle.

A middlebrow triumph in a distinctly odd middlebrow prize by a dedicated
writer who has struck a chord with the British reading public in a way that few
English novelists have, this will certainly score a footnote in the history of
early 21st-century British fiction.Mantel's only serious competition came from the immensely gifted Scots poet
Kathleen Jamie's exciting collection, The Overhaul – a lovely, lyrical
celebration of Scottishness and the Scots tongue. The judges would indeed have
been bold to make that their final choice. Costa juries, traditionally, tend to
take only the most gilt-edged risks.Bring Up the Bodies is unquestionably the bookies' and the booksellers'
favourite. In an exceedingly tough commercial climate, with the surge of the
Kindle and ebook, Mantel's win will give the trade a much-needed moment of
commercial relief. First and last, it's a recession beater.Such a verdict would probably not be its author's ambition. Mantel has made
her career with fiction and non-fiction of stunning originality. Naturally
brave, she has been the opposite of predictable. This novel, however, is nothing
if not reassuring. First, it takes one of medieval England's greatest thrillers
(the persecution, trial and death of Anne Boleyn) and gives it a clever
contemporary spin. Mixed with sharp, modern dialogue, the narrative exploits the
historic present tense to give an essentially hardcore historical novel some
extra literary pizzazz.It also meets the demand for a cracking good read – the carefully-crafted
entrapment of Boleyn and the alleged plotters is superbly told. Superior to Wolf
Hall, its predecessor, Bring Up the Bodies will stimulate a feel-good factor
throughout the nation's book groups.Whether it will be read as anything more than a fascinating curiosity in
years to come is another matter. Posterity is generally rather unkind towards
crowd-pleasing prizewinners. And this is a prizewinner with knobs
on.

The Chosen Dead author and "Kavanagh QC" scriptwriter M R Hall has launched a free online crime-writing course, with a competition for crime-writers.

Seven Secrets of Successful Crime Writing comprises a series of weekly videos, each covering a different aspect of crime writing including such "secrets" as: "However big the story, it must take place within a confined world" and "The central character must have a moral centre, but also be conflicted on many levels". Each week there will also be a detailed worksheet, with podcasts also available. At the end of the course, there will be a competition for the budding crime-writers, with prizes including an intensive two-day writing course at Goldsboro Books in central London, hosted by Hall and author William Ryan. Writers will be able to upload the first chapter of their crime novel to the Facebook page http://apps.facebook.com/sevensecrets-crime/ from the opening date of 11th March. Hall will judge entries, alongside Mantle publisher Maria Rejt and editor Sophie Orme. More details will be announced when the competition opens. The course can be found at www.facebook.com/MRHallAuthor.